A good title sequence can make or break a television programme or film. Bernard Lodge designed and engineered the early title sequences for the science fiction drama 'Doctor Who' including this lovely piece of inspired proto-psychedelia from 1963. By exploiting the abstract patterns of light which occurred when a television camera was pointed towards a monitor, he was able to create a fictional organic architecture of light, time and space. The technique, known as 'howlaround' was originally pioneered by a BBC technician called Ben Palmer for the programme 'Amahl And The Night Visitor' but it really came into it's own with this wonderful collage of image and sound by Bernard Lodge and Delia Derbyshire.
During my DW-following youth (the Pertwee-Baker years essentially) I always found the title sequence in its various generations with its hissing, dissolving, rippling and whooshing to be very unsettling and suggestive of what I didn't yet know as Body Horror. Its shudder-inducing qualities leaked into episodes like 'The Ark In Space', 'Claws of Axos','The Seeds of Doom', 'The Green Death', 'The Zygons' and 'Genesis of the Daleks', a shuffling, loose-skinned, guttural qulaity, like an invocation out of Lovecraft.
ReplyDeleteInvention has many fathers... from what I read it seems as though Bernard Lodge and company had help
ReplyDeletehttp://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/norman-taylor-creator-of-the-howlaround-visual-in-the-original-dr-who-title-sequence-2237431.html